CAIRO – The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) today expressed gratitude to the government of Canada for its donation of CAD$10 million (US$ 8 million) to support WFP school feeding for children of Syrian refugees alongside Egyptian children.

“I thank Canada for this substantial contribution allowing WFP to extend school feeding to include many vulnerable Syrian refugee children as well as those from the Egyptian host community adversely affected by the refugee influx,” said Lubna Alaman, WFP Country Director and Representative in Egypt.

RMMS presents an end of year trend summary and analysis for 2014 with a focus on the Horn of Africa and Yemen region and neighbouring areas and routes taken out of the region. For ease of reading this presentation uses few statistics but provides a generic overview of prominent trends. Statistical details can be found in RMMS literature produced during the course of 2014 (Regional Mixed Migration Monthly Summaries / Quarterly reports etc.).

On 23 February, ISIL forces kidnapped about 90 villagers including women and children after seizing the villages of Tal Shamiram and Tal Hermuz in north-east Syria according to the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights. The abductions took place when ISIL attacked a number of largely Assyrian Christian villages along the banks of the Khabour river in Al-Hassakeh governorate.

The Security Council today heard strong and sustained pleas to demonstrate leadership to end the barbaric and brutal warfare in Syria, as two senior United Nations officials briefed the 15-member body on the wider consequences of a conflict that entered its fifth year.

CAIRO, Egypt, February 23 (UNHCR) – A picture at an exhibition has helped to change the life of Judy El Khatib, a nine-year-old Syrian girl who had been unable to move her right arm since suffering bad burn injuries four years ago.

The young refugee suffered the debilitating injury in Damascus not long after the Syria crisis erupted in March 2011. She was playing in the kitchen when an explosion rocked the family home and knocked a pot of boiling water off the stove and all over her arm.

Planting of 2015 winter crops to be harvested from April, concluded in December. Vegetation response captured by the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index using satellite images suggests good establishment of winter crops.

As conflict continues in Syria, millions of people are in desperate need of assistance. The UK has committed £800 million of support in response to the humanitarian crisis, including food, medical care and relief items for over a million people in Syria and the region

Increasing its commitment to help those affected by the crisis in Syria, the United States is providing an additional $125 million in humanitarian assistance to the UN World Food Program (WFP), which feeds nearly six million Syrians and refugees from Syria every month. The announcement was made today by Kelly Clements, Deputy Assistant Secretary for the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, and Jack Myer, Principal Regional Advisor/Europe, Middle East and Central Asia, USAID Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance, in Geneva, Switzerland.

Myanmar: Fighting between the Myanmar army and the MNDAA, an insurgent group in the Kokang area of Shan state, displaced tens of thousands of people. Some fled into central Myanmar, while between 30,000 and 50,000 are thought to have crossed into Nansan, Yunnan province, China.

· Across the region, UNICEF vaccinated over 25 million children against polio including 2.9 million children in Syria alone resulting in the successful containment of the disease.

· UNICEF and partners provided water treatment chemicals to clean water for the network that reached 16.5 million people inside Syria, and has provided 2.1 million people with safe drinking water in host communities and camps in neighbouring countries